Jean-Paul Sartre

La Nausee

Those who know me know why I wanted to read this book. (The title was just a coincidental joy.) So I made me a birthday present of it and have only just stolen time to read the book. It took me a week. (Life with children.)

It was a used copy, and the old yellow highlighting might sum it up were I not slightly mentally ill: it stops at p. 13! I read on, because a man wrote the book, and I wanted his point of view. I was told, "Sartre is difficult." Only in as much as mental illness is difficult. Only as difficult as staring at those technicolor carnival reliefs painted on sideshow "cirque du freak" trailers. I have eyes, so I wanted to see. I did have to stand on tiptoes, and that was slightly painful until I grew numb and open (like Anny's thighs on stinging nettles).

All in all it is a book about existence...awareness of existence. Not simple existence, not even poetic existence, but profound inconceivable existence. God understands what I mean. My best attempt to explain this amorphous concept revolves around the act of saying a word again and again until it has no meaning yet the thing to which it applies still is. Or staring at one's reflection for a time adequate to induce a state of foreignness--where one no longer recognizes self but only an unsettling existence. It's the smallness that I feel when planets and stars spin across a planetarium's concave ceiling. Unsettling to know that it all is and that I am with it. What to do then? Master the art of shrugging it off or else become like the book's protagonist (Roquentin): "all alone, completely alone with horrible monstrosities, running through the streets, passing heavily in front of others, eyes staring, fleeing his ills yet carrying them with him..."

I am an outsider, of course; Roquentin has no God. His existence remains formless, shifting. In saying that, I don't think man would really invent God to ground or protect himself. I think it would be as easy to be driven insane by religion, and the only safety found is what happens in another life. Better to serve Someone because you love Him, because He is the only One worthy of service. I can see the promise of heaven, but so too can I see comfort in composting; it is less exhausting, could be more appealing than going on and on. So I believe, because I believe, therefore my existence is purposed. Although I imagine I could be comfortable, perhaps more so, without a purpose. Roquentin seems not to be comfortable having no purpose; his lobster tastes like soap. He has outlived himself.

I think if others have not been startled to discover existence in moments like this, they will be disgusted by La Nausee. It will be psychobabble, mental illness, a ridiculous waste of time. I'm not sure I would disagree with that, save little hidden treasures. While no suctorialist, I recognize the gem of a nuance when I see one, and La Nausee holds many in its long gallery:

*I feel more and more need to write--in the same proportion as I grow old, you might say.

*My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves.

*Beware of literature. I must follow the pen, without looking for words.

*The soul of the Self-Taught Man is in his eyes, his magnificent, blindman's eyes, where it blooms. Let mine do the same, let it come and stick its nose against the windows: they could exchange greetings.

*I don't listen to them any more: they annoy me. They're going to sleep together. They know it. Each one knows that the other knows it.

*Virgan [a humanist] was without equal. He would take off his spectacles, as if to show himself naked in his man's flesh, and stare at me with eloquent eyes, with a weary, insistent look which seemed to undress me, and drag out my human essence, then he would murmur melodiously: "There are people, old man, there are people," giving the "there are" a sort of awkward power, as if his love of people, perpetually new and astonished, was caught up in its giant wings.

*I don't want to be integrated, I don't want my good red blood to go and fatten this lymphatic beast...

*All is drowned in poetic impression.

*There are no more perfect moments.

*I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again."

*I live surrounded by my dead passions.

*I outlive myself.

*You annoyed me with your stolid look. You seemed to say: I'm normal; and you practically breathed health, you dripped with moral well-being.

*There are times when you mustn't cry--or else you'll be unclean. But if you drop a log on your foot, you can do as you please...

*I live in the past...I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it.

Over half of p. 154 is heartbreaking text, but it's real, it's life, it's worth reading.

*My whole life is behind me. I see it completely, I see its shape and the slow movements which have brought me this far. There is little to say about it: a lost game, that's all.

*Now I am going to be like Anny, I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

*I find it strange that I have to stay two more hours in this city which, without bothering about me anymore, has straightened up its furniture and put it under dust sheets so as to be able to uncover it in all its freshness, to new arrivals this evening, or tomorrow. I feel more forgotten than ever.

I won't give away the bizarre event culminating the Self-Taught Man's (S-TM) journey through the alphabet, but I will say that I thought Sartre something of a hypocrite to present such an angry reaction to the Corsican and not the S-TM. I thought he was a moral relativist, yet this seems like pluralism, and what is going too far? Even so, I shouldn't talk about such things; they're far beyond my scope of understanding. What I do understand, what does resonate, supersedes what I do not and makes for a good read.

I'm particularly happy with the last page and think Sartre ended the novel well:

*But a time would come when the book would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think that a little of its clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance. Perhaps one day, thinking precisely of this hour, of this gloomy hour in which I wait, stooping, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: "That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started." And I might succeed--in the past, nothing but the past--in accepting myself.

In some ways, La Nausee exists where I exist, and so it touches me.

Besides, any book that mentions family members (Fouche, Napoleon's confidant) gets my vote, cheap easy that I am.